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Black Box Detector Arrives

Black Box Detector Arrives, Specialist American equipment designed to detect black box signals arrived in Australia on Wednesday to aid in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

The TPL-25 is towed behind a ship at a speed of three miles per hour, at around 1000 feet off the sea floor. It has highly sensitive listening capability and can pick up the pings from a black box from up to about 20,000 feet, Cmdr. Chris Budde said in a statement Tuesday.

It will be fitted to an Australian vessel called the Ocean Shield, which is due to arrive in Perth on Friday.

The search radius of two miles, one mile in either direction, allows coverage of up to 150 square miles per day depending on the weather, according U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet.

Finding the doomed airplane’s voice and data recorders before the battery-powered underwater signal they transmit is silenced forever, may help authorities figure out why Flight 370 crashed into the southern Indian Ocean on what should have been a routine flight to Beijing.

Meanwhile, the air search began again early Wednesday local time as weather conditions improved over the previous day, Australian authorities said. Four Chinese ships also joined HMAS Success in the search area.